


Five Bridges Luthe Built and One He Burned

by LeBibish



Category: Damar Series - Robin McKinley
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:45:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeBibish/pseuds/LeBibish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A history of connections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Bridges Luthe Built and One He Burned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tyleet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/gifts).



> I find Luthe an interesting but very difficult character. I hope this lives up to some of what you were looking for.

Five bridges Luthe built (and one he burned)

1\. 

They were rather stubborn. It was fortunate that he was patient—and had nearly 500 years of practice dealing with their entirely obstinate lineage. One pig-headed legend in particular...

In fact, she was rather good practice for the pair of them. Aerin's obliviousness was well-matched by Corlath and Angharad Crewe's complete and utter misunderstandings of each others' emotions. He hadn't even been all that cryptic when he talked to them about the near future, and they still managed to fall into a despair of missed communication.

It was only justice that Aerin be forced to help deal with them as well. She was quite capable of walking through the fires to bring hope and courage to her descendents; and her own time with Gonturan meant she could help guide Harimad-sol in using the magic of the sword—but Luthe thought there was something else needed as well. Something to make sure that young Harry not only could handle the magic, but also didn't lose herself in it.

He smiled peacefully as he reached out with his kelar and strengthened a connection between two souls standing on distant battlefields...

2.

Over 100 generations of men had lived and died since he was last known by the people who lived in the hills. Before that he had spent nearly as long as an oracle lighting the pathways of chance and fortune for the people of Damar. And before that he had spend an unrecorded eon learning magic enough to cut through time instead of living in it.

How to compare the span of a single mortal lifetime?

He had told her that he did not mark the passage of time as she did, and that was true. What meaning does time have when the past is so distant that even history has forgotten it and the future is constantly crowding his interactions with most mortals? Days and nights blurred together even for short-lived humans after enough of them had passed. Seasons barely touched his little valley, for he didn't particularly like winter and that was enough to keep its touch light and mild. 

Yet when Tor the Just was laid to rest, and Aerin Firehair rode a milk-white steed up the mountains, shedding gray hair and wrinkles like a cicada leaving behind an old shell, he could have told you in detail the exact count of every day since she had rode away from him on another white horse.

It was days later, days of laughter in the morning and loving hands at night (and sometimes the other way round) that he found himself asking if she was there to stay, for even though her husband was gone, her country was not and he knew her love had always been two-fold.

"Well, you can certainly keep me for longer than the space of a dream," Aerin smiled at him.

Luthe decided that he could be content to build whatever magic was needed to call her back to him when she needed to wander.

3.

The valley was still open to travelers. Luthe had simply stopped his own presence from being known. He was finding the current state of humanity extremely wearying. 

Their hypocrisy in revering their Royal family's fading gifts of kelar while examining with suspicion and fear any hint of "Northern" magic was particularly annoying. Perhaps the final straw for him had been when he realized that his companions in the valley were still hiding so that they didn't have to deal with visitors but now were also hiding so that they didn't have to deal with the visitor's inevitably bad reaction to "non-humans."

As if it took "demon-mischief" to make people quarrel with each other or overreach for power. 

This wasn't to say that the people in the North were any better. They were entirely tiresome in their constant petty struggles and clan grudges. And it was actually true that they sometimes crafted magic designed to steal into the minds and souls of men and fan the flames of their desires, their insecurities, their discontents...whatever it would take to create strife, to weaken the bonds of community and loyalty. Frankly, some of them considered that just good politics.

Luthe blamed Agsded. 

Agsded was Goriolo's best student in magic; which he had spend the relatively short amount of time they had overlapped attempting to torment Luthe with. Luthe didn't particularly care about Agsded's superiority complex, but he found his constant belittling of those around him annoying. (And then as Agsded's power grew to match his pride and his malevolence to match his meanness, Luthe started to find him actually terrifying).

Where Luthe had chosen to stay separate from the world in his mountains and give small bits of prescience to those willing to seek him out, Agsded had chosen to stay separate in his uncanny tower and direct the culture and history of the North with creeping evil and surprisingly subtle uses of power. It really wasn't strange at all that the Northerners had turned out the way they had, with any attempts at unity and peacefulness undermined by the most powerful evil magician in the world.

When Aerin fled to Luthe's mountain, sick with the poison her brother had fed her, part of Luthe wanted her as far from both her brother and him as he could manage to get her.

It was his prophecy that said one of Agsded's own blood would defeat him.

Guilt is one of the least pleasant emotions Luthe has ever felt.

When Luthe and Aerin determined that she would be strong enough to carry a baby to term, he thought he would have to help her travel somewhere very distant. Perhaps...the East...where there was magic strong enough to forge the sword Gonturan, which might have rivaled even Goriolo's work.

He did not expect her to come back from a trip to the Lake of Dreams talking about a Damarian, even if he was the King. Damarian kelar had faded to the ignominy of glorifying minor illusions and the ability to repair crockery. It was hardly the kind of power needed to defeat Agsded, who had guided an entire nation in maliciousness and who Luthe strongly suspected had a hand in the death of Goriolo, who had been older than the written word and never shown any sign of age.

But, "He is kind," said Aerin.

So Luthe helped a pale-skinned, fiery-haired woman pass unmolested through the superstitious Damarian villages and into the City itself. 

4.

Luthe did not enjoy wandering. Learning new things was interesting and useful, but he would far rather lure teachers into his peaceful valley than venture out to find them. His own far-sightedness and the unique properties of the water of sight meant that he could keep quite well-informed of the outside world when he wanted to. There was simply no need for him to leave his beloved home and subject himself to the unpleasantness of the lowlands.

None of which explained why he was currently traveling in lands with names he couldn't actually pronounce.

He also wasn't sure why he acquired the sword, or why he had continued to carry it. He was a master Mage, not a swordsman, and this particular sword was very much a woman's sword. It gave off a distinct feeling of discontent at being held by a man for any particular length of time.

It was probably his own stubbornness that kept him traveling after the mysterious urge had dissipated, Luthe acknowledged ruefully to himself, weeks later.

Still more weeks passed before he was able to convince the sword to stop interfering with the magic he needed to use to return home. It was one of the most delicate negotiations he was ever involved in.

 

5\. 

He loved the walls of his home. The stones dreamed of memories forgotten even in story. Even the trees, with their peaceful wisdom, could not match the long memory of the bones of the earth. And the stones here, in this place, dreamed of peace above all things. 

The great hall had sat in the meadow below the Lake of Dreams for years beyond recall. It had been a refuge in times of war and a haven in times of calm. It was home to no god, but it held the same feeling of safety and otherness that holy places across the world did.

A man with visions of the future and the wisdom necessary to shape those visions into advice rather than traps was sought out by the rest of the world. It meant facing futures full of war and strife, people determined to tear each other down, and the mischief of malice and greed. It meant having to give those who sought him out unpleasant news and then having to deal with their reactions as if he had caused the future instead of merely foretelling it.

He entirely understood why the other dwellers of the valley tended to hide when visitors came calling. 

His magic was more than strong enough that when the next war came with chants of intolerance and hate, he could have kept it all out. When new refugees streamed in, bearing distasteful biases and stubborn minds, he could have closed the valley; could have shut out all visitors and kept the inhabitants of the valley from wandering out into the less pleasant world. 

But the stones of the valley dreamed of peace. From the stories of war, they remembered the people who had sheltered there peacefully, fleeing from violence and rejecting it. The stones remembered the laughter of children who had lived there generations ago—a sound Luthe found particularly lovely. 

There was a saying he vaguely remembered, full of the kind of painful practicality that humanity held fast to: "A bird may love a fish, but where would they live?" 

Luthe's answer was easy: they would live on the shore of the Lake of Dreams, which touches worlds unknown and where the wind sings of peace.

\+ One Bridge He Burned

Luthe-to-become was neither called nor named Luthe. His childhood call-name he fed to the Fire at his manhood rite and the name given to him by the elders was his only for a few days before the Mage came.

He was looking for students; those with a spark of magic greater than the tribal gifts and an ability to learn and think in strange and unusual ways. He passed through many villages; stayed with many tribes; dismissed many would-be magicians. This small community, scrabbling for survival on the edge of a cold ocean, held no more promise than any other. It was merely an easy place to rest for a night before he continued on.

The people of the village shared a common heritage and living with the people of the sea. Small magics were common; everyone had noticed that the boy was good at predicting the turns of the wind and the best fishing, but it was not much more than others were able to do. The name given him by the elders set the path of his life out easily and certainly. He was content to stay in his family's village, fishing from his family's boat, and performing the small rituals that grow between two intelligent species sharing a home.

Luthe-to-become dreamed of a storm the night before the Mage came, and in the morning he looked at the stranger and told him things that had not happened yet.

He was not yet Luthe when he left with the Mage, but he had already forgotten the name his family had called him. Goriolo, master Mage, told him when they left the village that he left his old name behind as well. A Mage needed an open mind and heart to learn and so must cast off all ties of the past. 

But he kept his secret name; the name that tied his soul to the shape of his body at his birth.

Luthe, once the name had settled on him, was neither a quick student nor a brilliant one. It is only truth that he often frustrated his teacher with his complacency in his studies. He was diligent—as one who expects to wake and work and continue on is. Where other students burned through their studies, Luthe plodded on. Where they eagerly jumped at any opportunity to make their own way in fame and infamy, he stayed with his teacher and his studies. 

"I left my home to learn and so I will do," said Luthe to Goriolo when the Mage asked him if he was ready to leave. The master frowned at his student, who had never truly accepted the need to cast off his old self. 

It was pure stubbornness on Luthe's part that he continued to refer to "home" and to use his far-sight to watch tides that had no impact on his current life. Pure stubbornness that kept his room full of paintings of the ocean and a strange smell of salt and water, long after the last people who had known the names of he-who-became-Luthe were dead and gone. For all that his people held in common with the creatures of the ocean's magic, they were still mortal. Mages were not. 

Goriolo was old enough that his own home had been forgotten not only by himself but by all of the world as well. It might have been a surprise to him when he set the mark of a master Mage on Luthe and Luthe walked away on a road leading exactly the opposite direction of his homeland carrying nothing but his clothes and some food. It might not have been. 

Luthe did not like wandering. He had spent his entire childhood in one place and he would have been content to stay there. When he had left, it was only to spend much, much longer in another place without leaving. He didn't know where he was going when he left Goriolo but he knew it would be someplace he could stay. 

He did not enjoy life on the road, sleeping somewhere strange every night. He did not enjoy meeting new people—he did not enjoy being surrounded by their thoughts and feelings and constant poking, pushing concerns.

The forests in the mountains Luthe stopped in were far from the ocean, even farther from his home. Among tall trees in dark and still forests, there is a sound as constant and overwhelming as the waves upon the shore. The wind dances between the upper branches and they sing back to it. 

He thought about building a fire, about feeding to it his childhood name—Luthe—and finding a name suited for a man who might spend his days not simply foretelling the weather but guiding and creating it to match the needs of his people.

He did not do this.

He thought of his secret name, known only to his mother and the birthing woman and shared with him after he became a man, which tied his soul to his body and his past to his present. The name he had kept in his heart since leaving his people. He remembered all that he had been and all that he had learned to be; all of which was contained in a single name, known now only by him.

He kept the name Luthe. His secret name he gave to the mountains and the stones ate it.


End file.
